Consider this my official guest post on the demise of guest posting. Yes, this also makes me part of the reason why (as Matt says) we can’t have nice things in the SEO community.

Guest blogging is a tactic, not strategy

Let’s start off with the word “tactic.” I chose that word on purpose. We’ve all seen the plethora of “guest blogging strategy” posts and articles. I want to make one thing clear–guest posting is not a strategy. It’s a tactic. There’s a difference.
A strategy involves a long term plan and a goal. A tactic is merely one action that helps accomplish that strategy. I’ll get more into this in a minute.

It seems whenever an SEO tactic becomes popular, Google decides to take action on it. Why is that? Conspiracy theorists will be quick to update their usual argument about Google hating SEO and trying to sell more adwords and whatnot. Ignore them. Google doesn’t hate SEO. Google hates automated tactics that provide little value to actual website visitors such as creating links and content just to increase search rankings.

SEOs ruined guest blogging, not Matt Cutts

The reason Google is taking action on guest posting is because we ruined it. We ruined it the same way we ruined meta keywords, and directories, and press releases, and blogrolls, and widgets, and infographics, and link exchanges, and article submissions, and forums, and comments, and wikipedia, and (on second thought I won’t mention this tactic, it still works,) and reviews, and ratings, and Pinterest, and, well you get the picture.

We ruined guest posting just like we ruined everything that came before it and just like we’ll probably ruin whatever comes after it. It’s moments like this I’m glad Twitter isn’t a ranking factor, because I’m sure we’d ruin that too.

[Rhea note: actually, SEOs DID ruin Twitter when it and all other major social platforms were forced to implement nofollows!]

We went too “all-in” with guest blogging, and now we’re paying the price. For years it’s been the only link building tactic talked about at conferences and events. We even guest blogged about the best methods for finding blogs to guest blog on. Guest Blogging pretty much replaced the word link building in the same way that “[odd number] things [current trending topic] can teach us about [SEO|ORM|PPC|Mobile|Social]” replaced blog headlines.

Matt’s post shouldn’t come as a surprise. Anybody who’s been around SEO long enough knows that eventually all tactics are abused enough to find themselves in Google’s crosshairs.

SEOs need to fix our strategy, not the tactics

Guest blogging isn’t the problem though–we’re the problem. We can debate tactics all we want, but nothing is going to change. It’s the strategy that’s broken, and we need to address that.

It’s time our industry took a step back from the “what” and started taking a longer look at the “why” of SEO tactics. It’s time we put down our checklists and ranking factors and correlation studies and focused on our overall strategy and goals.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of directories

How can we forget Danny Sullivan’s famous rant about directories and link building? If you missed it before, I’ll summarize:

A long time ago Google told us to go get directory links. At that time people actually used things like DMOZ or the Yahoo! directory to find sites, so it was good advice. The message was “go get your site linked where people will see it,” but all we heard was the word “directory.” Instead of trying to get our site mentioned in places where people actually went, SEOs started creating tons of directories nobody ever visited solely for the purpose of submitting our sites to them.

Directories weren’t the problem at all–SEOs just got the message wrong.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of press releases

Sadly, we repeated the same process with press releases. The original message of “put out a press release, and if a journalist picks it up you’ll get lots of newspaper links” somehow got lost as we created programs to submit press releases to thousands of press release sites that have never been visited by an actual journalist.

(Tip: when the homepage of a site is geared toward getting you to submit and not toward actual site visitors, it’s not a good SEO strategy.)

Surely we learned after the PR backlash right? Nope.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of forums and comments

We did the same with forum links and comment links. But we learned from that right? Of course not.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of infographics

Like a moth to a flame we went full speed ahead into infographics. Sure, they started out useful. You’d see an infographic about population breakdowns that linked back to the census report or one about test scores that linked to some educational study. These were awesome and got tons of traffic. They were also relevant.

Somehow though, we forgot about the words “useful” and “relevant” and focused only on the word “infographic.” It’s almost as if we thought that somehow being attached to an infographic made spammy off topic links acceptable. Pretty soon we saw infographics about the best places to live in America that linked to play-poker-online-for-free-viagra.info

[Rhea note: actually, that domain is still available. Score!]

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of guest blogging

Then came guest blogging. At first, many in the community were saying things like “this can’t be ruined, can it?” “Nobody would be stupid enough to mix in total spam on their own blog or put their name on it would they?”

No, they weren’t that dumb. They were dumber.

Not only did people start posting utter crap, but they even created blogs that nobody ever read for the sole purpose of posting utter crap. Then, they automated it.

I’m pretty sure “automatically generate articles and send them to scraped email addresses until somebody posts them” is NOT what Matt meant when he used words like “high quality,” “original,” relevant”, and “value” in his original condonement of guest blogging.) In his condemning post, Cutts used the word “decay” and given our history with SEO tactics, I can’t really think of a better way to describe it.

It’s not the tactic that matters, it’s the strategy.

If your strategy is to expose your site to a relevant audience by creating useful content and connections, you can’t go wrong. If your strategy is to simply change the method by which you automatically acquire low-quality, irrelvant, and high-risk links, you’ll end up right back here reading this same rant from me in a different medium.

Spammy guest blogging is dead, not guest posting

Guest blogging can still work. You wouldn’t turn down a column on CNN or an editorial in the Huffington Post if they said you couldn’t have a dofollow link would you? Of course not, because those places send traffic – and that’s the key. It’s about the audience, not the HTML.

This is a guest post. You’re clearly reading it because I (hopefully) have something interesting to say. There’s probably a link to my personal website or twitter account (I’m not sure, I didn’t ask for anything) but that wasn’t the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post was to share my thoughts and insights with an audience who might find it useful – and that strategy won’t ever die.

The same is true for press releases. Those simply writing them for the links from press release sites won’t see any benefit, but those writing press releases that actually get picked up by journalists will see huge traffic influxes.

Infographics? Same thing. If you’re summarizing your data and linking back to that data – well then any site including your graphic will gladly send their readers over to view the source of that data and learn more.

Directories? Go ask the businesses listed in Angie’s list or APlaceForMom if directories are dead. They might not be getting rankings from them, but they’re getting phone calls.

Link building leads to ranking. Ranking leads to more traffic. That’s always how I’ve viewed it, yet some of us got so caught up in the link building tactics and ranking metrics that we forgot traffic was the actual goal. So yeah, these tactics may be dead from a link building, Google manipulating, Pagerank point of view – but if you approach them solely from a “send me more visitors” point of view, then they remain strong and viable.

Going forward I’m sure Google will have no problem finding guest blogs and ignoring their links and I’m sure several SEOs will find creative ways to disguise their guest blogs and manipulate Google’s author trust–just as I’m sure this won’t be the last guest post about guest posting.

Don’t worry though, I’m confident another SEO tactic will soon take its place; and it’ll only be a matter of time before we ruin that too.

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/a-guest-post-on-the-death-of-guest-posting/feed/29Survey Results: Educational Background of Digital Marketers & SEOs Revealedhttp://outspokenmedia.com/seo/survey-results-educational-background-of-digital-marketers-seos-revealed/
http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/survey-results-educational-background-of-digital-marketers-seos-revealed/#commentsWed, 16 Oct 2013 16:57:44 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=17146Read More]]>Ever wonder how most of the industry stumbled into this field? I certainly have, because I’m always looking for exceptional team members and scaling digital marketing education in a small agency is one of the biggest challenges I face as a business owner.

Wonder no longer–I surveyed the industry and we had a fantastic response!

Dear SEOs/Marketers, have 2 min to take a quick 5-question survey on industry backgrounds? http://t.co/QFWM1lD3kL TY and plz share!

How long have you been performing SEO services (for your own or client sites)?

What is your highest level of education?

If you received a degree, what field was this in?

Did you take any online marketing, SEO, digital marketing, or related courses in school?

If you answered “yes” to the question above, please briefly describe the course, program, certification, or degree you received training in.

I collected the most relevant course titles, degrees, and classes shared by respondents:

“Digital Marketing” module in degree

Full Sail’s Internet Marketing MS program

BCIT – Direct Response Marketing Program

eCommerce master degree

class in eCommerce at Virginia Tech

Internet marketing course (x3)

Digital entrepreneurship

Internet marketing course during MBA (x2)

E-Business during MBA

Postdegree in digital marketing and communication

Digital marketing course

UGA New Media Institute Certification Program

University module on online marketing principles

The best responses that seem to sum up the extent of everyone’s exposure to digital marketing and/or SEO during school:

“I took an internet marketing class as part of my undergraduate coursework. It basically involved me going to class and listening to a guy ramble on about his experience running a failed ecommerce website. Dabbled a little in analytics, but didn’t learn much.”

“I was doing a double major in English and business. I had a single course on online marketing. I dropped out when I realized I could learn more applicable things online for free.”

“The internet did not exist when I was in school… “”cut and paste”” was done with a scalpel and hot wax.”

“Yes, but barely. There was some online media and HTML courses, but nothing directly correlated with SEO or Internet marketing.”

What I found interesting is how the comments often led to folks discussing their own independent study:

What does all of this mean?

Well, I’ll talk about it from the point of view of a boutique, digital marketing agency owner:

Clients demand great work, but perhaps even more important is that we stay ahead of the industry when it comes to the services we offer. If I can’t find qualified candidates and continually train them, we’re going to get left behind as link development or online reputation management best practices evolve. You will, too.

So, do you have your training process worked out? Or, do you have a magical means of finding qualified talent?

After surveying the industry, I was fascinated by the diversity in our educational backgrounds. Yes, there are some common elements, but it’s exactly what I thought–most of us fell into this field from other disciplines. Less than ten percent of digital marketers had ANY training on the subject in school!

And my favorite lesson–in the absence of traditional education, he who trains most efficiently will rise to the top.

That last part is pretty important to me, because I think (vain moment) that I’m a pretty damn good trainer. Don’t believe me? Check out the deck I created for the meet up at the end of the post. I’ll let my past team members share their thoughts on the subject.

Why does this matter? We’re about to ramp up the business heavily in 2014. It’s time to scale, and scaling digital marketing education is at the top of my mind, because I refuse to compromise on quality or our custom, in-house approach to the work. Unfortunately, training takes time, but that’s time I’ll carve out knowing it means we maintain team happiness, client satisfaction, and industry recognition. Hopefully, you’re thinking about the same things as a consultant, agency, in-house marketer, or executive.

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/survey-results-educational-background-of-digital-marketers-seos-revealed/feed/1Manny Rivas on YouTube & Retargeting: SMX 2013 Coveragehttp://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/manny-rivas-on-youtube-optimization-tips-for-the-second-most-popular-search-engine-smx-2013-coverage/
http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/manny-rivas-on-youtube-optimization-tips-for-the-second-most-popular-search-engine-smx-2013-coverage/#commentsThu, 03 Oct 2013 15:00:31 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=17108Read More]]>It’s always bittersweet to make it to the last day of a conference, and today was no exception. Outspoken Media has two interviews going live today, so keep your eyes peeled for Casie Gillette’s interview with actionable tips from Content: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly. We interviewed Manny Rivas earlier this week, which was really a bonus, since he spoke on Pro-level Tips For Succeeding At Retargeting on Tuesday, and he was on the fantastic YouTube panel this morning. YouTube takeaways are below, and it’s no surprise that the panel—Greg Finn of Cyprus North Moderating, Matt Siltala of Avalaunch Media, Purna Virji of Stroll, and Manny Rivas of aimClear–brought it.

SMX East 2013 Coverage: YouTube: Optimization Tips For the Second Most-Popular Search Engine

If the panel on YouTube optimization didn’t know their audience, I don’t know who does. It’s hard to win over a group of marketers the morning after a killer party (thank you Yext! Love those hummingbird cocktails!), but they came in with the perfect approach: brilliant tips, and a few videos appealing to that base level we all needed.

Manny Rivas took the audience through strategizing your YouTube approach. B2B can be sexy too; you just have to tell a story to the right audience. Make sure you are optimizing your videos with annotations, and external links, but start with the keyword research.

Thought leadership, tutorials, infographics, branded yet catchy, thematic series are all great approaches to creating video content. Video engagement success will be determined by research and relationships you build well before the video is created. Identify users by mining comments, and finding active users in the fields you are targeting.

Purna Virji pimped everyone’s YouTube channels, and offered up tips for building a strong foundation for your channel, curating your content and engaging your visitors to keep them there, and using analytics to audit your efforts. To start with make sure you’ve made the most of your channel icon, and channel URL. Make your video metadata compelling with core keywords first, and branding later. With annotations make sure you avoid the lower third of the video, don’t obstruct content, and use analytics to test time and placement.

You want to develop a subscriber following; you can customize your channel page for new viewers and subscribers, which offers a new experience for different kinds of users. Let your viewership know why they should become a subscriber, and commit to putting the effort into following through. To get a better sense of viewer process make sure you are looking at playback locations and traffic sources reports in analytics. To evaluate your user engagement make sure you use subscribers report to show which videos stand out, and to evaluate what kind of content works for you.

Matt Siltala, social maven, emphasized the importance of certain user signals to monitor: you want user engagement with likes and dislikes, and full views. Use humor in a dryer industry like pest control, or use a targeted traffic approach by creating a video where the subject matter and title are specific things people are searching for to guide your content.

Are you optimizing? Did you forget to link to your site? For shame! Make sure your using proper categories and GEO tagging. Share your videos across all your social profiles. Add your videos to your Google+ profile, it helps with authorship, and use those same social profiles for video ideas: local Facebook groups will give you insight into local community questions and needs. Lastly, repurpose your most successful content as a video.

Manny On YouTube Optimization and Marketing

You got your start in marketing through rap videos on YouTube, can you talk a bit about how your YouTube work for clients has driven value, and what kind of obstacles you’ve come up against, whether it was initial client buy-in, resource allocation, etc.? Also as a side note, that’s probably one of the cooler entries into marketing.

Surprisingly enough, there are actually a lot of similarities from what I was doing – posting rap videos to what we’re doing for clients, because at the core of what I was doing, I wanted to build a subscribership, a viewer base, that would come view my videos time and time again.

The way that I had to do that was find interested users. I would go out there and I would identify other hip-hop artists that were publishing videos and I would just engage with them. For a hip-hop artist one of the biggest things for us is attention to lyrics. The way that I found the most engagement and made sure that I got people back to check out my content, was I would listen to the lyrics of other artists that are trying to build their viewer base. I would comment and say, “Man, this line right here where you said …, was really cool,” or quote certain parts of their verses and more often than not you’re complimenting them, so they come and check you out.

But anyways, what we’re doing for clients here is the same sort of demographic research where we’re trying to find engaged, active users and when we start out with companies that are looking to start a YouTube presence, we have to find those individuals – it’s all demographic research. We have to find the most engaged users that we can potentially engage with and bring into our community.

Resource allocation is a big thing. Clients get so excited about what they could do with video, but they just don’t have the resources to commit to it. They have amazing ideas of what an amazing video would be; they just don’t have the resources.

It’s having an understanding of what you can do. Animation is a great way to effectively create video and communicate your message without having to pay for actors, or pay for a whole lot of voiceover acting and things like that.

We’ve also had wins with direct response in YouTube selling products. For one particular company, we increased sales of their products through selling on their channel page. When I’m thinking about video as a sales mechanism, you have to think about it as a landing page. It’s just like a landing page. You have to give enough information to the viewer to take them to the next step.

You think about if a viewer were to do a search in YouTube; they find your YouTube ad; they’re expecting to see a video, which they’re going to; they come to your video and if the searches that you’re targeting are intent driven, you should be able to target those individuals that are seeking or close to farther down in the funnel. If your video is able to answer their questions and take them to the next level, you shouldn’t have a problem converting them.

We were using longer form videos, there were two different lengths. There was one that was 17 minutes and one that was more along the 30 minute line. Once users get past a certain point in the video, we’re pretty confident that they’re going to convert. We were able to identify the searches that were the ones where users had a higher proclivity to convert, and optimize towards showing those users, or those people searching for those terms the right video. We were able to dramatically increase conversions since we came into the picture and started optimizing those video campaigns, which was a pretty good win.

You had a great article in Search Engine Land back in January about building a direct response funnel in youtube. What are some of the ways that you begin to think about process and strategies for individual clients? What’s in your toolbox?

In terms of driving sales with YouTube, like I was kind of saying before, I like to start by understanding how video can effectively communicate a particular product or service. Understanding, can video sell my blue widgets with one touch or are viewers more likely to come back or continue gathering information first after they watch the video?

There are three primary tools I use for doing direct response in YouTube, and those are the in-search ad unit, in-display, and the pre-roll, which is in-stream. I tend to use the in-search and in-display. I have found those to be more effective in terms of direct response.

In terms of building my campaigns and identifying search inventory, one of the most powerful tools that I have found is Scrapebox. Scrapebox is a tool that actually scrapes the AJAX suggestion box in YouTube. When you go to the search box and you start typing snowboard or something like that, and then there are a whole bunch of suggestions that populate below it, what Scrapebox does is scrape those suggestions.

YouTube has this keyword research tool and it sucks; it’s completely horrible. It doesn’t give you anything relevant. The best keyword research that I’ve been able to do is literally looking at the suggestions in the dropdown menu from YouTube because those searches, or those recommended queries are coming because they’ve been searched for quite a bit. There is high frequency in those areas, and people are either searching for those things or there is a lot of content out there. That’s where I like to start.

In that example of increasing success events with YouTube remarketing, one thing that we did was use custom thumbnails in the headline. What we were trying to do with the video was specifically get them to go back to the knowledge center or back to the site and get the free download for this particular white paper. The custom thumbnail really helped to prequalify the traffic because in the image that we’re using for the video, it talked about downloading the free guide. Not only did we have our copy in the ad, we had copy within the image that talked about what the end objective was. I think custom thumbnails are great.

External linking annotations, which are only available to certain advertisers if they are spending a certain amount with ad words per month, allows you to place external links in the video, at certain points in the video, to a particular page. You can usually look at analytics to determine when viewers are most engaged to put that annotation, and direct them back to the site.

Lastly, the video remarketing pivots around engagement. If you look at how or what these remarketing list options are, it’s things like “this viewer watched a certain video”, or “this viewer liked this specific video”, or “they disliked this certain video”. “They subscribed to your channel”; “they unsubscribed to your channel”. You can begin to develop some pretty customized messages to those individuals to bring them back or hopefully get them to subscribe again if they unsubscribed.

Manny On Retargeting

Can you talk a little bit about how complex the world of retargeting has become between search retargeting, site retargeting, Facebook exchange, etc.? What are some ways that marketers can begin to think about navigating that landscape?

No matter what the marketing channel or medium is, I think you have to know what to expect and just understand where those channels fit within the purchasing cycle or whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish.

It’s not necessarily that retargeting is just for e-commerce. E-commerce retargeting is just really common. You hear these examples of e-commerce as retargeting being a channel that can help out e-commerce marketers, but there are publications that use retargeting for their editorial calendar. We do that.

I think it begins with a fundamental understanding of the business, like understanding how long your purchase cycle is or what kind of information satisfies a potential customer when gathering information. Do customers often repurchase and how often do they repurchase? Do they buy the same items? Do they buy similar items?

Think about visitors that are coming to read your content. If you’re retargeting those, you’re going to want to make sure that they’re engaged users. What’s the threshold for determining an engaged user, do they view x many pages? Do they stay on the page for more than x many minutes? At what point, in terms of time on site are pages viewed, is a visitor likely to return? I think those are some basic questions that can help you determine how retargeting is going to fit into your marketing mix.

What are some of the bigger wins you’ve had for clients with retargeting?

With one client in particular, this is B2B, we effectively used YouTube remarketing lists, which in my personal opinion, are one of the most under-leveraged or under-utilized remarketing plays out there.

We used those remarketing lists to increase success events and those success events vary from actual sales to leads to white paper downloads. We effectively increased those success events using these remarketing lists because the content that they were publishing – this goes for any company that’s publishing helpful video content – if you’re driving users down the funnel in way that you’re starting with information – was informative pieces of content that drove them to the next logical place in the funnel.

You should be creating lists, remarketing lists for each step on the funnel so that you can remarket to those individuals and serve them ad messages that meet them where they’re at in the funnel. You know what I mean?

One of my favorite approaches is leveraging prequalified organic traffic. When I say prequalified organic traffic, make sure that these users are engaged. I only want to retarget people that have been on the site for more than three minutes and viewed more than four pages or something like that. It gives me an idea that these users are a little bit more valuable and show a little bit more intent on my site than just any visitor to the site.

I like the idea of leveraging the organic side of that traffic to drive conversions. If you think about it, a lot of retargeting, you pay for the visitor once. Let’s say you do a search ad or a display ad and you pay for that visitor to come to your site. They go through; they might load up their shopping cart and then bail. You retarget them and that’s great, but you already paid for them once, so you’re paying for them again.

If you’re getting organic traffic for your site, you can set up organic lists of folks that are still coming in, loading up their cart, and possibly abandoning it and retarget those folks. Essentially, the first time that you’re actually paying for the visit is on the retargeting level so you know that they show some interest; they’re already aware of your brand, so that’s something that I always tend to try and set up whenever I engage a company. I will start setting up remarketing lists and retargeting lists within Google analytics because no matter whether or not they’re going to use it, I like to at least have the option there. That’s one practice that I just commonly do with new accounts.

Manny On Retargeting On a Limited Budget & Not Being a Creep

If I have a limited budget, what type of retargeting would be best? Or are there certain businesses where certain retargeting methods work better than others?

Yes, I like to identify my most engaged users. We work with some of the largest household brands in the world, and we work with some of the coolest startups too. The cool thing about really large brands is you have tons and tons of data. With smaller brands or really cool startups that are just getting their start, you are working with small sets of data. So what I like to do is identify the most engaged users.

They might be 25 users on a list, but those are my 25 best friends. It’s not always about targeting a massive audience. Many times it’s just about targeting a small number of your biggest fans. I keep saying it over and over, but targeting users who have spent so much time on your site and visited so many pages, is a good place to start. If you’re seeing that your list is growing and growing and it’s bigger than you want to commit to adding dollars to, then pick apart the amount of minutes that they have spent on the site; really dig down into how engaged these users have to be.

Keep in mind through this, that if you’re targeting a small group of people, you don’t want to creep them out. One of the balances with retargeting is making sure that you’re not being a creep, so you want to make sure that you’re adding frequency caps per day and make sure that there is a life span on those remarketing lists so that they don’t just go on indefinitely and keep serving those users ads.

Manny on Holiday Retargeting & SMX Sessions

With the holidays approaching, what are some tips for retargeting for ecommerce providers?

I think you have to start early, so start targeting and building your audiences early. I’m personally a procrastinator when it comes to this type of thing and holiday planning, but there are a lot of people out there that are not and hunt early, like my wife.

I would start early to build those lists, because I think that there are folks out there that are starting the planning, and you have the opportunity to build lists around certain categories of your products, or certain areas of your business, and communicate with them as they begin to make their purchasing decisions. Right now they’re most likely doing information gathering, so I think starting early is very important.

The other thing is to focus on devices. We don’t want to forget about smart phones and tablets and how these devices are being used in the buying cycles. Many people, myself included, will be on their smart phones researching a product while they’re physically in the store. It’s an opportunity for e-commerce businesses to stay competitive with brick and mortar and offline means of sales.

I think search targeting also presents a unique opportunity, because a lot of the inventory that you are getting within Chango, and other search remarketing platforms out there, are taken from shopping sites. These are people searching within shopping engines. I think search retargeting is an excellent place to consider retargeting for the holidays.

What SMX session are you looking forward to the most, and why?

Well, of course, the Pro-level Tips for Succeeding at Retargeting and YouTube Optimization! I was interested in Richard Albonzi’s keynote, because I just want to see where Twitter is going next and with the new release of Twitter’s social retargeting, I’m curious if they’re going to make any advancements with that, or if they’re going to make any changes/updates to that type of retargeting. I know there are some limitations to it.

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/manny-rivas-on-youtube-optimization-tips-for-the-second-most-popular-search-engine-smx-2013-coverage/feed/0Casie Gillette on Content: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: SMX East 2013http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/casie-gillette-on-content-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-smx-east-2013/
http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/casie-gillette-on-content-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-smx-east-2013/#commentsThu, 03 Oct 2013 14:35:15 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=17096Read More]]>It’s the last day of SMX East, and the much anticipated conversation panel on “Content: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly” is just wrapping up. It was a killer lineup: Jenny Halasz, the president of Archology, Arnie Kuenn, president of Vertical Measures, Andrew Melchior, the VP and Founder of Avalaunch Media, Dan Shure Owner Evolving SEO, and Casie Gillette, the Director of Online Marketing for KoMarketing Associates. We’ve got a few takeaways below from all of the panelists, but we were also lucky enough to steal a few minutes of Casie Gillete’s time earlier this week to talk content one-on-one.

SMX East 2013 Day 3:
Content: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Andrew Melchior recommends that you use Reddit and subreddits as a great place to submit your content to and find content ideas as well as Google News, Yahoo, Bing, and Tumblr. Spend time on the sites where the customer lives. On product pages don’t just discuss product details, but product experiences.

Arnie Kuenn suggested marketers use Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer to check competitor’s content for back links to see where they got coverage. For B2B find questions people are asking about your services and craft posts about those (not posts about you!). Use whitepapers and guides to track potential leads and demonstrate content success/performance.

Jenny Halasz recommends you use the who, what, why, where, how method when crafting content for your audience. B2B isn’t just “B to Boring” it’s about connecting with customers and you can shift content to interest your audience, not just about your company.

Dan Shure says you don’t have to start content through a blog, you could start small with a single piece and see how it goes. Most company blogs get no interaction. You need to add value. Check out Upworthy. Consider doing an 80/20 data analysis with your content. Measure search value (what content is being searched on), an often over-looked metric for performance tracking.

Casie Gillette said marketers should use video to explain your services, which can be a unique content type that people are actually interested in. Content is a lot of work to keep up with though, be prepared for it. When tracking content success look at page views, shares, submissions/downloads on landing pages, always tie it back to your goals. Cypress North releases content marketing ideas for the upcoming month, which is a great way to find unique content topics. Write for your audience’s needs.

Matt McGee is moderating, but threw in a tip to write about solving problems with as much detail as possible to flesh out product pages.

Casie on Developing Content Strategy

Casie is a superstar with content. We picked her brain on creating strategy despite obstacles, using local strategies to leverage content, and digital marketing in 2013.

How do you develop a content strategy for a client? What does that process usually look like?

For any client we start with the basics. We take a deep dive in to their business. We learn about what their goals are. Do they drive leads? Are they looking for online sales? Then we’ll start to get in to some of the keyword research stuff learning about the competitive landscape, and that kind of helps us better understand what their content needs actually are. I also love to take a look at like the search results to see what’s showing up for their key phrases. I find that extremely helpful just because it gives you a better idea of what their customers are looking for or at least what Google thinks they’re looking for. But it’s helpful because that way when you’re targeting specific things you know here are some of the things that are showing up. And then we’ll work with them to figure out what their resources are. What their budget is and how we can really get the biggest bang for their buck. If they don’t have a blog you know we’re not going to have them invest like thousands of dollars to create a blog if we can do something else. That’s really it.

How have you dealt with the challenge of creating good content for a client in the face of restrictions? (Whether they are budgetary/resource restrictions, on-site code freezes, or even a client with a different opinion on creating content)

You know unfortunately these things come up more than I’d like. I just had a client who was bought out by a larger company. We’d been working with them for a couple years, and we just developed like this great blog. They just get hundreds of thousands of visits, and it really is the core of our strategy. We have these set goals. We have traffic goals. We have lead goals and it’s driven by this blog strategy. Well, we found out that they’re basically shutting the blog down so they don’t want to invest resources. We’ve actually spent the last couple of weeks figuring out what else we can do. Now we have to look at offsite options. We have to look at their main site to think about do we add content there, what can we do there? We had to restructure what it is we’re giving them, and I think that the key.

There’s always a way to help a client with restrictions; it’s just thinking about what that actually is. Thinking outside the box if a client doesn’t have time is a big thing. It’s always budgetary or resource restrictions. If the client doesn’t have time to come up with a post one of the things that we’ll actually do is we’ll come up with topics, and then just do a short outline for them so that way they have it, and they don’t have to spend all that time coming up with topics. I think there’s always a way to work around. It’s just a little bit of restructuring and thinking about what else you can do for them that will help in the same capacity.

Have you ever worked with any clients that have industries that are just really difficult creating content for? How have you combated that issue?

Actually, we have a lot of tech clients and clients that it’s a very technical product that’s hard to understand, so we started doing content for one of my clients probably about six months ago. We had said, “All right. Let us help you write some blog posts,” and what we found is that despite how great our content writers are, it just really wasn’t what they were looking for in terms of technical capacity and knowledge, and they would spend a lot of time going through and correcting it. So what we just decided was the best way for us to give them useful content was to write things that were geared towards their marketing demographic versus trying to write things geared towards their CTOs. We just had to switch who we were writing for. Instead of trying to write those technical posts we just started writing posts that are more geared towards the marketing crew that are a little more basic and still giving them good content.

What’s one creative or overlooked content strategy or method that you’ve been using?

I’m a huge fan of using your customer service, which isn’t necessarily overlooked, but it might be underutilized. At my old company we actually had a couple of our customer service reps sit in on our marketing meetings to let us know what the biggest issues they were seeing were. I tell clients all the time who are using live chat or looking to use live chat, get a tool that actually keeps those questions and responses. It’s great for content. It’s easy to write, and then more importantly it’s what people are actually looking for. Those are the things that you’re not answering on your site. If someone is calling or someone is asking you things make sure you’re answering that. I always think it’s a really easy place to look and something that people don’t tend to think of.

Casie on Bad Content

What are some of the most common content mistakes that you encounter when you take on a new client? Or that you see in your day to day marketing?

I think sometimes what happens is we assume that what’s worked for someone else will work for this client, and sometimes it just doesn’t. Sometimes what we find is that a client isn’t as receptive as a different client, or their goals are different than what I thought their goals were. That’s why we’ve really started doing a lot more vetting at the onset to figure out what they are looking for and what they are open to, especially around content, because if there are brand restrictions, if there are things that they’re just not comfortable doing, and you know that we need that to do them to be successful, sometimes you just have to say, “This probably is not going to work.”

A lot of time, I think the other things is that people think I have to get content up. I have to get content up. I have to get content up. And you don’t have to get crappy content up. Take that extra couple days and spend the time to get good content up. We’ve dealt with that with clients and even internally going from we have to give them tons of content to just let’s give them more in-depth good content.

Speaking of content and outreach, there’s been a lot of news about Infographics, guest posts, and press releases being devalued. What do you think that the average business should be focusing on content wise?

You know I think it’s always smart to start with your own site, build it up, but yeah those third party things are valuable. Just because you hear Infographics are devalued, that doesn’t mean there’s not value in doing one. You can create one that’s really good and really relevant to your business and it’s going to be picked up. It might just be brand exposure. It’s the same thing with press releases. I tell my clients, “Don’t hesitate to issue a press release if you have something great to say.” Don’t issue them all the time just because you feel like it’s helpful. If you have something good to say, say it. Get that out there.

But I do think it’s always important to start with your own site, and then expand out. We do still try to get our clients guest posts but they’re on valuable sites. They’re on relevant sites where their customers are, and they’re going to get some exposure. I think that’s a big misconception: people get scared when they hear, “Oh don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this.” I think there’s still value in those things if you’re just not trying to exploit it.

Casie on using Local Strategies to Inform Outreach & Content

You did a post on local strategies and real life strategies for link building on Search Engine Land. Could you talk a little bit about kind of leveraging local connections for content or for link building and using your community to think about what you could be doing with your site?

Absolutely, I think even if you’re not a local business, or you don’t do business locally, there’s still a lot of advantages of interacting with your local community. I’m a part of the American Marketing Association, the Boston Chapter, and I’m involved with their social media team. It’s good for me but it’s also good for co-marketing because we get to go to some of these events. We’re talked about in the social media platforms and any business can do that. One of the things I had noted in there was just that when you think about the cost of doing national marketing or going to these national conferences it’s kind of crazy. People can’t afford to do that, but some of these local events get your name in front of smaller businesses or just people who could connect you better, and it’s a lot more affordable. Even if you’re going to be a sponsor for a local event, it’s definitely more affordable.

And then one of the other things is that I don’t think people think about that you tend to get a link when you sign up for events. If you have a bunch of people going to an event, that’s an opportunity to meet people, and an opportunity to get links.

Recaps are always another great opportunity and can help build locally-focused content. It’s also worth seeing if there’s any sort of community site associated with the organization putting on the event. For example, AMA Boston has a site called Connect where members can sign up and post. You’ll see articles on there discussing events, local marketing news, and it’s great for establishing local connections. On top of that you get a profile with your name, bio, a link (hooray), and it’s pushed out on their social channels.

I’m also a huge fan of the “What to do/What to see” posts that companies put out when a conference is in their city. I think it’s such a clever way to create content about your city, it’s helpful to industry friends and potential customers coming to the show, and those things get serious shares!

Casie on Keyword Research & Content Inspiration

Well, I use Feedly, I have had a blog reader since I first started in this industry and a lot of those same blogs are on it, but now I use it for clients as well. I love Twitter. I’m on it because there’s people based on your client or just even based on what you’re interested in. You can see some of those conversations happening. What the things are that people are talking about. What are the things that are happening in that industry? It’s a great place to get good ideas. Also, I still subscribe to Google Alerts. You know some of the basics are really helpful. If you’re looking at the right things I think you can get those tools to really work for you. A lot of times just doing a Google search is a great tool. If I’m out of ideas, just checking out what already been written helps. I use a lot of basic but valuable tools, nothing too groundbreaking.

Along the same line as restrictions, how do you think you are going to move forward with a big chunk of keyword data now not provided? How are you planning on working around that?

Probably for the past six to eight months I’ve already been incorporating Webmaster Tools data in to my report, in to the data, in to how we’re like looking at things. It’s super unfortunate, especially for our clients that are lead driven. They still need to know how people get to their white papers or get to their forms. Without that data it’s tough. We’re just using the tools that we have right now, looking at the Webmaster Tools data, etc. A lot of our clients do use ad words so there’s that, but it’s a little bit unfortunate that that’s the route that we have to take.

What SMX session are you looking forward to the most, and why?

You know I wasn’t sure until Googles announcement yesterday really solidified my response. The Life Beyond Google session I think it already looked pretty cool and it certainly isn’t groundbreaking idea but like, “Hey you need to do some different things here and not completely rely on Google,” but I think it looks cool, and the speakers are good. I think it’s just really important as a reminder, like don’t put all your eggs in like one Google basket. I think it will be good to hear and see some of the other things that people are doing to supplement their traffic.

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/casie-gillette-on-content-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-smx-east-2013/feed/1Dana DiTomaso on Local: SMX East 2013http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/dana-ditomaso-on-local-smx-east-2013/
http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/dana-ditomaso-on-local-smx-east-2013/#commentsWed, 02 Oct 2013 17:45:55 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=17074Read More]]>It’s day two at SMX East, and after a hearty breakfast, and a killer keynote from Richard Alfonsi of Twitter, we were off to Must Have Local Search Tactics. After spending some time in one of the warmer rooms yesterday, we are happy to report that the Local and Retail Track Room was comfortably chilly. If you missed our interview with Ted Ives yesterday, you’ll want to check it out, and read up on “Life Beyond Google” tactics.

The local panel had some real powerhouses: Matt McGee of Search Engine Land Moderating, David Mihm of Moz, Chris Silver Smith of Argent Media, and Dana DiTomaso, the CEO of Kick Point Inc. We’ve got some fantastic local marketing takeaways from the session below, and we were able to catch up with Dana before SMX.

SMX East 2013 Day 2:
Must Have Local Search Tactics Takeaways

David Mihm took the audience through maximizing your local citations. Citation related signals are critical as a local search ranking factor, so make sure you are consistent on-site, and with critical platforms. Every store location must have its own page on the website; establishing your canonical locations should be a priority. Localeze, Factual, Acxiom, and Infogroup are all critical tier one platforms for the local search ecosystem, so make sure your information is correct.

David emphasized the necessity be where your competitors are, Whitespark is a paid service that will do that research for you–make sure you are doing competitive analysis with other local and national competitors. Once you have the basics, think more creatively to get those mentions and citations: become the drop off site for school donation drives, host classes or events, make sure job listings are utilized, offer discounts for local hotels, alumni associations, etc. These all provide strong, high quality citations.

Dana DiTomaso took the audience through PPC for local. First of all, make sure you label and name in your PPC campaigns; you want to understand your data. Use radius targeting in your enhanced campaigns to take advantage of user location for competitive terms. Add the local citation extensions; it can be a competitive differentiator with your ads.

Chris Silver Smith talked about best practices for structured data. You need to use semantic markup to aid search engines in interpreting your site correctly, and it can increase your chances of getting rich snippets appearing with your page in the search results. You can use both hCard microformating and Micro Data/schema.org, but Chris suggests moving towards schema.org. Webmaster tools has a structured data testing tool that you need to use.

For businesses that are closely associated with their founder, make sure you are using the author tag. That author information is a valuable trust factor for local search. Likewise, logo optimization is an underutilized tactic, and reviews and testimonials can be marked up too. Maximize categories in Google Places, and engineer a great image for the carousel in search (make sure you have images in Google Places).

Dana on Creating Local Search Tactics

Dana is an all-around local SEO bad-ass. If you aren’t already following Dana on twitter, you should be: If not for her on-point commentary on local and search marketing in general, for gems like this. We were able to get her chatting about her favorite local search tactics, Google+ frustrations, and PPC segmentation.

What is your local search tactic checklist like? Are there any tactics that you think are losing importance? Others that were formerly overlooked and need to be used more frequently?

That’s funny, because I’m kind of revising our local tactics checklist right now. I think that the big changes have come from what we call “Google+, local, places, social, etc.” in the office, because the name changes from day-to-day. I think that’s been the big change for us, the frustration in having to deal with that is pretty time consuming. It’s incredibly difficult to get a straight answer from Google, on even something as simple as claiming a page. For example, if the client has a Google+ page and then they have the Google+ local page, you have to merge the two. Not even that, just the basics of getting that Google+ local page set up is so tricky.

We have a client who we’ve dealt with this for. I think we’ve got the pin, we set it up, Google accepted it, page isn’t showing up. Call Google, they’re working on it; check back in a week. Check back a week later, still not working. You know it’s just not working, and what do you tell a client? Other than: “Well Google doesn’t have their shit together.” You can quote me on that. I think for local SEOs it’s incredibly frustrating, because it does feel like that. Google doesn’t have their shit together. How can you expect to deal with a system that’s flawed and flaky, when it’s the key to showing up well in local search results?

So, we do everything else. We do citation stuff; we do all these NAP consistency, local citations, title tags, all the stuff you’re supposed to do in local SEO. But I think the number one thing that sucks up the most amount of our time is indeed that Google+ stuff.

Then we do a lot more PPC for local, which is what I’m going to be talking about at SMX East, because I think that not a lot of people talk about PPC for local.

What are some overlooked or creative ways that businesses can think about providing local content?

I think a lot of businesses get stuck in “I can’t be bothered to spend a lot of time on this,” and content seems like a lot of work. So, they have eight different neighborhoods that they service, and they take one piece of content and do a search replace on the neighborhood name, and then put that up.

I think instead, businesses need to focus more on finding real stories that are happening in their different locations, or even if they have just one location; and just start telling those stories. I think that those stories don’t have to come from the owner of the business, or the person responsible for marketing. I think that if you check in with all of your staff on a regular basis, just find out what’s going on.

Find that interesting story: look at your reviews, and look at what people are saying about you, and if there’s a story there that can be told. I think that it’s really easy content in the sense that you’re just asking for people to talk about themselves, which they love doing. Then you publish it on the website, and people are more than happy to promote that stuff. If a business reached out to a regular and said “Hey, we really like that you had your anniversary here, can you tell us why?” Get him to write about it, tidy it up for grammar and what not, and there you go, that’s content. Of course, they’re going to share it on their Facebook and then tell all their friends about it, who are probably going to share the story as well, “Hey, isn’t this restaurant great, they really care about their customers,” it’s easy content.

When it comes to small businesses, listening to those conversations and identifying stories, are there any tools or different methods that you would encourage your clients to use to listen to that conversation and segment out from the noise? Or do you find, more often than not, that there’s not a significant conversation happening with a small business, so it’s even tough to pinpoint?

I think sometimes we find out stuff when we’re just sitting there. I told this story recently in a presentation. I was sitting in the client’s waiting room, waiting for their dermatologist. I was just sitting in the waiting room, waiting to see my client, and I heard the receptionist answer the phone and talk about how, “Yes, you can get your tattoo removed while you’re pregnant,” and I thought holy crap, I didn’t know you could do that. We should really check that as a keyword, and indeed it was. We had a tattoo removal campaign, but pregnancy tattoo removal was not specifically in there. So we added it in, which really helped with getting more impressions for their phrases.

I think that just listening to stuff like that helps, when we’re waiting at a client’s office, we have really serendipitous moments where we get to hear things that the client normally wouldn’t mention in a meeting. So, we try to drag it out of them, or we try to show up a little bit early and just listen to what kinds of phone calls and stuff that people are getting, and kind of eavesdrop on the receptionist.

I also tell clients, when you have your staff meeting, ask people, “Hey, does anybody have any fun stories from last week that they want to share.” “Did anything really cool happen? Was there a fun customer interaction? Or, what are you really excited about doing this week at your job?

I think that it’s great to generate content, but I also think from a business building standpoint, you feel like your all part of the team, and the employees also like to see their stories being reflected on the company’s website. It makes them feel like they’re part of the company too.

Then, when he talked about the ranking factors and where they’re going, what does usurp really mean? In Cyprus Shepard’s follow up, I feel like he tried to be a little bit more conclusive than the data actually is. There is definitely something to be said for a site that has really great content, and therefore gets a lot of shares. If it ends up ranking really well, is it because it’s a really good site with really good content that probably gets lots of links? Or is it because it got shared on Google+? That’s a difficult chicken and egg situation.

I also think that maybe Matt Cutts was being a little too disingenuous when he said, “No, no, no that’s not it, and then asked him to repeat the study with different variables. Come on. Here are some hints, and I’m going to get you to repeat the study using exactly these variables and then you’re going to get the result I want you to get.” That felt a little bit sneaky, but I feel like Google+ has absolutely influenced rankings. I think that the one take away from it that’s really important to note, is that sharing your content on Google+ does mean that it gets indexed incredibly quickly. So you’re showing up in the organics that much faster, which is good if you have news based content.

Dana on PPC Segmentation

When it comes to PPC in ads, how do you do segmentation? I know that you mentioned that your presentation at SMX is going to be on local tactics for PPC. Can you give us kind of a preview of what that looked like, and when you start to think of a campaign in terms of these fun, unique stories, how does that help with targeting specific groups?

What I’m going to be talking about has actually ended up being basically every interesting local tactic we’ve used in the last few months. I think what’s really interesting and what we’re doing right now is a campaign for the city of Edmonton. We’re using the new enhanced radius targeting, specifically for a bunch of recreation centers to push their classes. They have yoga and spin, and at some places they have swimming classes. So, if you live within five kilometers of the rec center, you’re seeing the ad for the rec center closest to you.

We just started the campaign a few weeks ago, and it’s going exceptionally well so far. You’re getting the rec center that’s right for you. The click-through rate on mobile devices is double what it is on desktop. The click-through rate for some of the ads like yoga, which is a pretty competitive craze here—I imagine it is in most places. We’ve even got as high as 4% and 5% click-through rate on some of the ads, and we’re using yoga broadly to start off with. It’s not the most precise keyword in the world right now, it’s pretty lazy, and we’re still getting a really high click-through rate. So, we’re impressed at what you can do in terms of radius segmentation.

Dana on “Not Provided” & the Future of Reporting

Google now seems to be making every single user go through a redirect to secure a search, which means we’ve now lost keyword data within analytics. I imagine that as a company that does both paid and organic search, it’s a little bit easier because you have access to those paid campaigns for keyword data. How much do you rely on paid search to help inform organic efforts?

I don’t know, for us it’s all part of one campaign. So, we’re thinking about the paid keyword data and what’s played really well, but often what we’re also thinking about is making sure that we’re just showing up, twice on the page. So, if it’s a phrase that the client is ranking well for, we’ll still run the ad word, just maybe with a lower bid.

Because I find that, and I think other people have proven this, too, that the click-through rate is better if you have PPC and organic on the same page than if you just have one or the other. Because they think, “Oh wow, this company’s all over here, they must be really awesome.” So, the ideal world is you have ad words and a places map marker come up, and an organic search presence, but you can’t always do that. At least you can try to get two out of three.

As for the not provided stuff, we’ve just stopped looking at organic data too deeply in the reports we give to our clients. I’ll still report on keywords, in the sense that I’ll look at the keyword data, and will yank out what is interesting. So, if there was a particularly interesting organic search term that came up, then we’ll say to the client, “Hey, this was really interesting, we might want to consider pushing this a little bit further.” But in terms of reporting on the actual keywords and keywords that converted, there is very little that we can do now. We were actually trying to phase out most of our clients from reporting on that data now anyways. From our client’s perspective, we’ve never focused heavily on reporting on that. The reporting that they get from us is based on how many leads they’ve got coming in, and what their cost per lead is, and what their cost per sale is; if we can derive that kind of information, if we have that ability to link it all up. So, from our perspective, as long as they’re still hitting their targets on leads and sales, then what does it matter if you know the exact keywords?

Can you talk a little bit more about reporting and showing ROI without that keyword data?

We try to establish a baseline. What are is the client doing now? It helps if the client hasn’t worked with an SEO agency before, to be honest. Because then they’re not asking us questions like “Well, how many links did you build for me.” They’re not ruined by the previous bad agency who was focused on the wrong matrix. Without that experience, we can say to them, “Tell us how much you want to increase your business by this year,” and “Can you handle that increase in business,” and “Let’s talk about your business plan,” and “Let’s talk about how many things you need to sell.” We have a homebuilder client, for them it’s really easy, did the home sell, yes/no? For them, they track when people walk into a show home, so we know how many walk-ins they got in the show home. We know how many people filled out the form from their website.

Perhaps we can say okay, so we know that you had x number of visitors at your website, and you had x number of visitors to your show home. Let’s take that as a percentage, just to provide us with a baseline. Then, looking at the last 12 months, before you started working with us, we can see that fairly consistently you have a certain percentage of people who walk into your show home shown as a percentage of website visitors. That percentage is very consistent. So now we know that if we increase their website traffic we should be able to drive x number more people into their show homes. So, we tell them this theory, and then we do our work and lo and behold the theory held out. Now we’ve managed to increase their website traffic by about 30%. We can see that we now have 30% more people walking into their show homes. Now, we know that not everybody who walked into the show home visited the website, but we can also see a pretty strong co-relation between increased interest in the website and increased interest in people walking into the show home. And then their sales team takes it from there.

But the other thing that we’ve seen is we also have data on the number of people who walk onto the show home versus the number of people who put in offers, and that conversion rate has been increasing, which means that we are helping to drive more targeted traffic to the show home than they were getting. They were getting a lot more tire kickers before, and now they’re getting motivated people.

Dana on Local for Big Businesses

Local tactics for the larger corporation, or multi-city businesses: what are some of the tactics big business should be using?

I think big businesses need to get themselves better connected with the areas that they serve on the local level. That’s one area where a little company can kick a big companies butt, is by being that connected.

Why do you feel that your local coffee shop cares about you? Well, because they know your name and everything else. But at the same time, they actually are involved in the neighborhood. I know that some big companies will just plunk down a store, and feel good about it, but other brands really care.

For example, in Canada you have Home Hardware, which is a national brand, and they do a really good job. What they’ve done is that they’ve basically purchased up all the mom and pop hardware stores across Canada, and obviously, their big competitors are Home Depot and Rona, which is, again, Canadian. So the options are the big box style hardware stores, and Home Hardware, which are typically smaller, sometimes in urban areas. Sometimes they’re the only hardware store in a very small town.

What they do is they is they tell the stories of the owners, like, here are the owners, and they’re part of the family, and this is where they live. This is why they care about the community. They really encourage them to make videos, and talk on social, and be really a part of the community. They don’t necessarily have a corporate policy. They don’t have somebody from on high saying well this is the stuff that you have to tweet, or this is the stuff that you have to Facebook, or you used you’re/your incorrectly. It actually makes it more authentic, as much as I hate bad grammar. It makes it more authentic in the sense that this is actually the store owner typing the stuff into Facebook right now. And maybe they’re not the savviest social media user in the world, but at the same time I think that it gives it an authenticity that people respect and it makes them feel like they’re more connected to the local community. So, even though Home Hardware might be more expensive than the big box store, or they don’t have the best selection necessarily, people feel really good about it, and they’ll shop there because they feel like they’re supporting the community, even though Home Hardware is actually a national chain.

What SMX session are you looking forward to the most, and why?
Prioritizing Your Search Marketing Efforts. I think that that’s really interesting, because one of the things that I personally find difficult about conferences, is that you come back and you’re like, I have eight thousand new things to try. I would love to hear from veteran marketers on how they prioritize what they do. I think you can always pick up some good tricks from that. I mean there’s lots that I’m interested in, but I saw that one in particular, because I can’t believe that’s happening at the same time as me. I’m also interested in “Choosing a Digital Marketing Agency,” just because I want hear what people say.

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/dana-ditomaso-on-local-smx-east-2013/feed/0Ted Ives on Life Beyond Google: SMX East 2013http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/ted-ives-on-life-beyond-google-smx-east-2013/
http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/ted-ives-on-life-beyond-google-smx-east-2013/#commentsTue, 01 Oct 2013 18:07:05 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=17046Read More]]>It’s the first day of SMX East!

Rhea and I arrived yesterday after a gorgeous train ride down from Troy with the Hudson River ablaze in Fall colors. Then we hit the heat wave that is Manhattan and we’re ready to peel off layers in the conference rooms. A little heat won’t stop us from bringing you several in-depth interviews with some of the most compelling speakers SMX (and the industry) has to offer. If you missed it, check out our initial interview with the amazing Akvile Harlow of Third Door Media. Now let’s kick things off with our friend, Ted Ives.

With the search landscape ever changing, and the recent announcement that Google is moving to 100% secure search, creating a not-provided world for internet marketers everywhere, sitting in on Life Beyond Google: Diversifying your Digital Marketing seemed a natural choice. Matt McGee moderated, Matt Ballek from Magnet Media, Brandon Hassler from 97th Floor, and Ted Ives the Principal behind Coconut Headphones all presented, each suggested actionable ways to approach diversifying your marketing strategies. We have a few takeaways below, but we also had a chance to interview Ted earlier this week about broadening your marketing focus.

SMX East 2013 Day 1: Life Beyond Google Takeaways

Let’s kick things off with an overview of Ted’s presentation–the future of diverse digital marketing is all about leveraging content through social platforms, email marketing, and paid, and paying close attention to audience engagement.

Ted advocates creating beefy content that you can repurpose, split up, and promote in a variety of ways. Create white papers through addressing customer concerns, client processes, or other Q&A issues directly tied to the business.

Pay attention to where your conversions are coming from with paid search. Gather every keyword from the last 12 months that converted, and create a two minute video for each addressing that query. Alternately, Ted suggests interviewing an internal expert, then transcribe it, and use that content to create in-depth Q&As. The inspiration for your content is already out there, if you ask the right questions.

With Youtube, the ultimate goal should be engagement, not views. You need to focus on optimizing for engagement through targeting for each type of viewer: evergreen videos and tutorials for casual viewers, Q&A and industry news for subscribers, and bonus videos and collaborative videos for your super fans.

Brandon Hassler suggested two platforms for promoting content to drive traffic: Slideshare and Pinterest. With Slideshare, by creating one piece of content that can be split up into slides, you can repurpose your content, and drive traffic to the site through in-slide twitter embeds, and click through buttons that send the user to your site to view the full infographic.

For Pinterest, you want to be focusing on creating instructables for the DIY crowd. Moreover, you want to be creating instructables that are a just a little too large to be viewed within Pinterest. An instructuable that’s at least 500 px wide and 2,500 px long looks attractive in Pinterest, but can’t be viewed in full, driving the user to your site.

The key to life beyond Google is diversifying your platform marketing, and understanding the audience engagement for each platform. Make sure you are using the right metrics, and appealing to your audience in a way that gets more than just a view.

Ted Ives on Diversifying your Marketing Campaigns

Ted is a really smart guy, so if you have the chance to introduce yourself before the conference is over, we highly recommend doing so. Even if you don’t have the chance to say hello, you’ll want to read up on Ted’s thoughts on diverse marketing campaigns, chasing the algorithm, marketing in a 100% not-provided world, and the intersection of SEO and PR.

What should a diverse digital marketing campaign include in life beyond Google?

You need to think about not only channels, but about everything. I think a lot of people look at this topic, and they think I need to go find traffic from some other channel, but you really need to think about the whole process.

There was a guy named Claude Shannon who basically invented the field of information theory, and in the ‘40s he put together a model for communication. It was a very simple model of a person sending a message. You have a message, a channel, a receiver, a person who receives it, and then noise coming in kind of from the side, that you have to get attention beyond.

You need to think about marketing as that whole process. You have certain messages, channels, and an audience. You need to diversify your messages. You should have different formats, different types of material, different actual messages, different angles that you take, presented different ways.

Diversifying your channels, which is, what most people think about when they think about life behind Google, is just diversifying the channels, but that’s only one component. Then you need to diversify the audience. Going after different audience segments, thinking about who is interested in your product or service, why are they buying, why are they not buying?

If you read any of the persona stuff by Mike King, he’s got fantastic stuff about how to think about audiences, by combining Facebook data with Google analytics data. There are some interesting ways.

My message, so to speak, is you have to worry about message channel and audience to do all that.

You have a lot of experience scaling marketing efforts for enterprise level clients, can you talk a little bit about that process?

Yes, it’s interesting. Enterprise folks have pretty similar issues to medium and even small clients; a website architectural problem is sort of the same no matter the size of the organization. It’s funny. You’ll see a huge company that hasn’t resolved their “www” version of the domain to “ww1,” or opposite. They’re almost viewed like two separate websites from a page rank standpoint, and then a little company will have the same problem.

One of the problems is the same, but how they get fixed is what differs. Large companies, enterprises, you have more bureaucracy; it’s more about getting buy in, convincing other groups to do work for you. How do I get changes to the website done and how are they approved? Those sorts of things. Things like keyword research, and a lot of the other techniques really are the same, but it’s what you sort of do with the output that differs. It’s more about organizational behavior stuff with enterprises.

With so many recent Google updates, do you think it’s dangerous for digital marketers and webmasters to chase the algorithm? Or is there still value in trying to positively influence ranking factors through on-site/off-site tactics? Why or why not?

That’s a pretty broad, wide-open question. I don’t see how digital marketers and webmasters can afford not to chase the algorithm a little bit. You can’t just ignore what’s there, because it’s going to affect you, so I think people sort of think that they have to some degree.

What I think people miss is future proofing. You need to do things in a way where, let’s say Google makes a change down the road, you’re not going to get a hammer coming down on you because you were doing something stupid. I’m a big advocate of future proofing. You put yourself in the mind of Google’s spam team. How would I go after something? Then, just don’t ever do any of those things.

A real good rule of thumb I like to use is Wil Reynolds has this concept, “real company sh*t”. I am a huge advocate of that. You should basically be doing things that are normal for a real company to do, and guess what? If you actually do those things, you’re doing real marketing anyway, right? For instance, press releases, a lot of people did press releases for a long time.

Then Google makes some announcement, something about press releases and links and things. The industry says, oh press releases, those are out. Well, you have to look at what they said. I think, a while back there was some comment about links from press release sites are devalued, and if you really think about what that means, it’s affecting places like PRNewswire and PRWeb, maybe the page rank levels that you get from links on their own sites is sort of lower than otherwise.

I don’t think people do press releases to get page rank from PRNewswire. They do press release to get the word out, and get in front of people. As long as you’re getting the word out, getting in front of people, maybe you’re not doing anything crazy with anchor text, and then maybe we can talk about that a little later, I think press releases are totally valid tactics.

If you had been doing for press releases for many years in a dumb way; just having tons of crazy anchor text in there, pumping out press releases for no reason, really, other than to try to get links to individual pages. Yes, you probably got hurt or are going to get hurt at some point, so future proofing and not doing anything silly is a smart move.

What are some techniques for increasing traffic outside of search that you’ve seen a good ROI on for yourself or clients?

There are a lot of ways. I would say for a lot of people who are relying on organic traffic, there are a lot of things they should be doing. One is to immediately start trying out paid. Figure out if paid search can work for you. That’s sort of another leg on the marketing stool, very straightforward to add-ons. It doesn’t always work for everybody. Sometimes I’ll actually disprove for you, for your business model, for your conversion rate, for the way your website is; paid is just not going to work. You need to go redo the whole website.

Often it works well, and sometimes it hits it out of the park, so I would say stand beyond organic to paid, obviously from Google to Bing and things like this. E-mail marketing, especially if you’re a B2B company, I’m a big fan of marketing through audience management, try to grow your audience. You sort of acquire them and sort of engage, monetize, and retain. It’s a circle that goes around and around.

Your audience database is, really, a major asset and you should be treating it like one, and improving it, and cleaning it up, and constantly adding to it, and really managing your audience, rather than just sort of bringing leads in. You’ve got these existing people, why not leverage them? Then, social, obviously social, I don’t even know where to start talking about social, there’s so much there. Paid, e-mail marketing, social; those are the main alternatives for people.

Ted on Google’s recent 100% not-provided transition

Do you have any tips for digital marketing in this new 100% not-provided world? What are some of the strategies marketers can use to that will inform marketing and content without that keyword data?

I’m actually very happy you’re asking this question, because if you had asked me 24 hours ago, I would have had to have said, gee I have no idea what you should be doing here. I’ve been following the news like everybody. I’ve been reading what people have been saying for months about this, and myself, I’ve been kind of ignoring it until this week. I mean people can afford to hide under a rock and not worry about it too much, but at this point you’ve got to react to it.

I just saw Dan Shure, over at Evolving SEO, give a talk last night, actually, for Newport Interactive Marketers; it’s a really neat organization. It has people from around that area interested in interactive marketing, and they do talks. Dan gave a talk on a bunch of SEO stuff; he had a big chunk of it dedicated to talking about this not provided issue. He had two points:

One of them was the Google Webmaster Tools, you do still have some of this data in there and you can hook your webmaster tools account into Google analytics and you can get some of it that way. If you then do some drilling around and you can get a rough idea on a bunch of the keywords.

The other one, which I had not heard of, is apparently in Google analytics there is a setting somewhere to track keywords from site search on site. Let’s say you have Google Site Search set up for your website and you use Google searches, you can track that. The other thing is it doesn’t even need to be a Google site search.

The most site search techniques use a similar URL structure, so the keywords are separated by pluses and the same parameters and everything, so apparently it’ll actually work with a lot of them. You can actually track on site search stuff, which is kind of fascinating. That’s another interesting way you can get some of that data. It’s definitely going to be a challenge though, for a lot of people on many levels just having a lot less data.

Ted on the Intersection of PR and SEO

Your recent series of posts on Search Engine Land focuses on public relations–how important is it for digital marketers and SEOs to leverage public relations? Do you have any tips for coordinating SEO/PR efforts (without spamming PR Web with optimized anchor text links)?

I think the key is you don’t want to be just putting press releases out and then hoping something happens. Ideally, if a press release is coming out, there’s real news, it’s newsworthy, there’s probably somebody out there who cares about it. If they’re traditional journalists, you can say this is embargoed until such and such a date, please don’t write about it. If they’re bloggers, they may not even know what you’re talking about if you say the word embargo. It depends on who you’re dealing with. You reach out ahead of time, coordinate, and tell people that you’ve got some big announcement coming out, and maybe they’ll write about it. I don’t think that’s any kind of bad link building.

You’re doing the same thing that Proctor and Gamble does every day. If they come out with a new type of shampoo, they tell everybody about it and people write about it, because it’s interesting. Do normal company stuff. Do not put a lot of very specific anchor text links in there. I think it’s better to have links to the company, or home page for the most part. For anchor text I would just use the name of the company, maybe the brand name, or just what people call it, a naked link.

The one thing with press releases, they do get distributed around the web, and then you also have scraper sites, they may scrape these press releases and they could end up who knows where. You don’t want to have a press release with problematic anchor text showing up in fifty places down the road that you have no real way of removing. I would keep it real, keep it legit, and just be real with it.

Ted on Structured Data

Yes, absolutely. I think it’s a huge unknown scandal that Google has absorbed most of the PhDs in the world that understand artificial intelligence, search, natural language, all these sorts of topics. They’ve absorbed all these people, and what are these people doing? I don’t see what these people are working on. I’m not seeing innovations out of them. I though these people were supposed to be all writing classifiers so that computers could figure stuff out and classify things and figure out what’s going on. Why is it up to me, and everybody else in the industry, to classify the world for Google, and to structure all the stuff, and then mark things up, and highlight things on the screen, and enter things into databases?

Some level of structure is reasonable and to be expected, but just marking up the hell out of everything is to me a big disappointment from what I thought the promise of computers was going to be. When I was a kid in the early ‘80s I thought our computers were going to figure all this stuff out and instead, we have to put all this mark-up five different ways on a page; some of which a person can read, some of which they can’t. There’s a special one for Facebook.

There are all these different standards and things going on, and I don’t know why Google can’t look at a recipe and recognize it’s got a bunch of steps, it’s talking about flour and milk and eggs, it’s probably a recipe. These are probably the steps. These look like times. Why do you have to markup a recipe; shouldn’t it just figure it out? That kind of thing is very disappointing to me.

What SMX session are you looking forward to the most, and why?

I’ve looked through, and the one that has jumped out is a session on day three, “Content the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and that’s a panel. Dan Shure, he’s a good buddy of mine, so I’m looking forward to hearing him again, but also Jenny Halasz. I’m reading a lot of her stuff on search engine land and elsewhere lately, and frankly she is wicked smart and I’m really interested in hearing what she has to say because I don’t think I’ve ever heard her talk on anything before. So, Dan and Jenny are the two folks I’m looking forward to listening to the most.

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/ted-ives-on-life-beyond-google-smx-east-2013/feed/1SMX East 2013 Coverage: Behind the Scenes with Akvile Harlowhttp://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/smx-east-2013-coverage-behind-the-scenes-with-akvile-harlow/
http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/smx-east-2013-coverage-behind-the-scenes-with-akvile-harlow/#commentsTue, 24 Sep 2013 16:15:40 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=17002Read More]]>We made an announcement last week about what conferences we’ll be attending this fall. You may have noticed that in addition to attending SMX East, we’re doing coverage again this year.

SMX East is known for the quality of its speakers and the depth of content in the sessions. During the conference we’ll be taking that a step further and digging into hot industry topics and recent search trends with a few industry leaders. We’re always experimenting with new coverage formats, and this year we’re presenting our look behind the scenes as an interview series.We’re kicking it off today with an interview with the lovely Akvile Harlow, who is the Internet Marketing & Advertising Operations Manager at Third Door Media, the company behind Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, SMX, and Digital Marketing Depot. Akvile is a powerhouse behind the scenes. You probably won’t catch her standing still during the entirety of SMX East, but we were able to catch up with her about her work at Third Door Media, her favorite parts of her job, and her bucket list.

Akvile on Her Role at Third Door Media

Your role at Third Door has grown quite a bit since you began, how many hats do you wear today?
Oh, it surely has. Currently, I wear three hats, but always help my team where needed, even if it’s outside of my primary roles. We’re a tight-knit family here at TDM. As far as the hats I wear, I switch it up between B2B and B2C each day. For the B2C-related tasks, I’m responsible for our paid advertising campaigns via search and social channels for our Search Marketing Expo conferences. I also manage all of our social media marketing efforts for SMX. As of the last year or so, I’ve also taken on our B2B advertising operations, where I work with a variety of clients and manage their advertising campaigns on Search Engine Land and Marketing Land.

What does your day to day schedule look like with regard to balancing all of these different roles? How do you partition your time so you can get everything done?
Every Monday, my team and I meet to share reporting results for our individual channels, go over our marketing project list, discuss new ideas, and touch base about everything coming up and currently going on. It’s a great way to start off the week. My mornings begin with a French press filled with coffee and headphones glued to my ears, then I begin to dig into reporting for all paid advertising efforts for SMX and clients. I also answer and compose many emails throughout the day, check in on social channels to answer questions and share posts, and jump on calls with clients and colleagues. I usually do reporting and more analytical tasks in the mornings, and prefer to do all the ad copy, creatives, and social tasks in the afternoon.

I think I have a more analytical mindset in the morning when I get up first thing and drink a lot of coffee. And then I think towards the end of the day I can use the other side of my brain and get a little bit more creative when it comes to ad copy and doing some social stuff. If I have a big task and I finish it, I peek at our social channels just to answer any questions or see what’s going on.

I’ll usually start work at about 7:30, but no later than 8:00 a.m. I’m on the west coast, but a lot of my co-workers are on the east coast, because we all work remotely, so since my boss is on the east coast I like to have a few more hours in the day just to kind of be online and chat with her about any projects that are ongoing.

Akvile on SMX East

So what’s it like to send someone to SMX East? Why do businesses need to be at SMX?
Before I got hired at TDM I attended two SMX shows with my prior company. I was doing paid research at the time, and the only resources I had were online. That was the only thing available that I could learn and teach myself, since I didn’t have anybody at the time who would teach me the ropes. So although that was really helpful I didn’t realize how much more I could learn by attending a conference until I went to SMX. And looking back I don’t think that my career would be where it is now if I didn’t attend when I had gotten a chance to go. I learned from a lot of seasoned marketers. And I think that we’re really lucky to have such a wonderful and helpful industry. The community’s really stellar and I’m just really grateful that I got to attend when I did, because I made a lot of friends and partners and mentors, and I even got a job at SMX.

As for why businesses should attend, I think you can only learn so much by reading online. It’s a completely different learning experience to attend a show; you can ask all the questions that have been building up that you couldn’t find answers to, you can rub shoulders with other marketers, and gain a tremendous amount of knowledge to add to your own marketing tool box.

What is it about SMX East that sets it apart from other conferences?
SMX East has a really strong focus on search, and we make sure to cover all the current issues that marketers are facing. The agenda’s carefully crafted by our Search Engine Land programming team, and we always pick the most compelling presentations that we think will be valuable to our attendees. Aside from three days of practical sessions and a keynote from Twitter, we have an agenda filled with plenty of other goodies, like networking events.

As of SMX West earlier this year we started doing this SMX orientation, so if you’re a first-time conference attendee or just a first-time SMX attendee, we want you to get the most out of your time at the conference.

Following that, we have a “Meet and Greet” to kick off the conference. We have a “Meet Your Neighbor” networking breakfast table, in which you can sign up to have breakfast with somebody in your geographical location, so then after the show you can find people in your city, or in your state that you can connect with and continue to talk about marketing or business or just make friends with after the show.

We also have various other lunch topic tables. During lunch you can pick a topic, whether it’s analytics, or Google-enhanced campaigns, and discuss a certain topic while you have lunch.

We also have an expo hall reception, and to close off the week we also have our SMX After Dark Charity Party, which is sponsored by Yext, so all the donations will be going to the Boomer Esiason Foundation for fighting cystic fibrosis. We value that our attendees come to our shows and they take time out of the office, so we provide free WiFi, free shuttles from the Javits Convention Center to the Sheraton at Times Square, breakfast, hot and delicious lunches, plenty of snacks throughout the day, and all the refreshments and caffeinated beverages you might need to stay quenched and powered.

What are the hot topics at SMX East this year?
I think the hottest ones will probably be the one session on “The Most Important Search Ranking Factors” (since algorithms always change), “How to Super-Charge your PPC Results,” and “Leveraging Big Data,” there’s a lot of social tactics and local search must-haves that we’re going to discuss.

Akvile on Speaking & Industry Mentors

When you spoke at the orientation a year ago, was that your first time? Are you doing it again this year? How do you prepare for that? I know that you were so nervous about it, and you shouldn’t be because you’re awesome. Does having spoken help you empathize when working with speakers?
Speaking is not my forte, but to prepare for it, my boss, Kendra and I created a PowerPoint presentation, we practiced as much as we could before the actual presentation, and felt prepared since we knew the content. Before the actual presentation, I had to do another run through before my boss and our CEO. I was quite nervous but we ended up presenting to a packed room and got a really positive response from it. I really admire public speakers and because so many that I look up to have told me they get nervous as well, but you’d never notice. It’s quite a talent, that’s for sure. It just takes a lot of practice and knowing the subject matter.

What SMX speakers or industry mentors have shaped your marketing, or your work that you do with Third Door? Is there anyone who has been particularly influential?
Oh wow, this could be a very lengthy list. There are so many people, especially since I’ve been attending for so many years, but I’m a huge fan of Matt Siltala, Rae Hoffman, Ric Dragon, Casie Gillette, Annalise Kaylor is really great, and she started popping up on the conference circuit this year. Mark Traphagen when it comes to developing Google Plus, Rob Bucci, Annie Cushing, and most definitely you, Rhea.

And in terms of industry mentors, I would have to say that Marty Weintraub from aimClear has been a fantastic mentor and has become a friend over the last year. Especially when it comes to all things Facebook, he’s just super intelligent and filled with super creative marketing tactics, not to mention he’s probably one of the most animated speakers out there.

Akvile on Marketing

As part of your role at TDM, you handle many advertisers, how do you manage relationships and expectations with your B2B clients that you have?
We have one main goal in mind: deliver what we promise to our clients. We keep an open line of communication between everyone involved, and it’s usually the salespeople, the client, and me, since I do all the scheduling and reporting for their creatives. We just make sure to be transparent. I think that’s the most important way to build a positive and lasting relationship. Between Search Marketing Land, Marketing Land, SMX, and Digital Marketing Depot, we have a variety of deliverables for our clients. We usually like to get really creative, depending on what the client wants to achieve, so we can run text and display creative, host Webcasts, white papers, set up booths at our conferences, and a variety of other things, depending on what the client wants, and then we’ll give them feedback. Mainly we just want to maximize the clients’ return.

How do you get inspiration for your ad copy? Is there ever a moment where you decide to do something just for fun and it’s a little out of the box? Where do you come up with the ideas that you do, or do they come from the clients themselves?
It’s usually from me. It’s really the client work, they’ll usually provide ad copy, but if I think it will resonate better in a different way, I’ll suggest something else that we can test. And sometimes they’re all for it and sometimes they just prefer to run with their own, just to stay consistent with their own advertising efforts on other channels. But when it comes to SMX stuff I usually try to see what’s trending and what people are having issues with, or whether it’s answering a question, or sometimes I’ll look at previous pictures that we have from other shows, and if somebody’s doing a certain gesture in the photo I usually try to line that up with some ad copy to kind of give it a little visual effect.

I know you guys do a lot of retargeting. I’d love to know what’s your experience been with it, and are there any tips to it, or secrets of the trade when it comes to retargeting? Because I see your ads everywhere and they’re very creative and they definitely catch your eye.
Oh, thank you. Sorry for stalking you. When it comes to retargeting, over the last two and a half years I’ve been at SMX doing all their page stuff, I’ve tested a variety of channels and I’ve narrowed down which ones will work best for us depending on how many people will actually convert from them. I think that one of my favorite things, I don’t know if this works for everybody, but I think a Facebook exchange works extremely well because Facebook is a marketer’s gold mine. You can target so precisely.

There are some third party programs that we use, like AdRoll, which you can do that through. And they’re really easy to work with, you can alternate your text very quickly and switch it out, or if you want to do text or display. Just make sure that you have a frequency cap, because you don’t want to show it too often. But we basically started with a lot of channels when we first began, and they’re down to the ones that work best for us, we don’t use as many now, but we do maximize on our returns, so it’s good to test and see which networks work best for you.

Have you had any ads get turned down?
Yes, there have been some. When doing retargeting through Google they’re a lot pickier when it comes to ad approval. I’ve never had issues through other networks that I’ve been using, but Google. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of the ads that we’re running right now are football based, and they for some reason didn’t like them because of the content. And I’ve tried to resubmit them and change it, but I’ve narrowed it down to it might be the image on them that they don’t like, and they also didn’t like you using terms like “Google” or “Twitter,” or other branded terms in your ads. We just started running the Free Expo+ SMX banners, and they rejected those because I think that they say Google and Twitter in them.

That’s certainly a marketing challenge. Along those lines, what part of your job at Third Door Media is the most challenging or most rewarding?
Good question. Oftentimes, I think the most challenging thing is going to be the most rewarding at the end of the day. It is challenging to wear this many hats, because it’s kind of three jobs in one, but learning to balance everything has taken time but it also keeps me on my toes. I have to maximize the return on all the channels that I manage, and I really enjoy that I get to switch it up because I can choose the right and left side of my brain.

Akvile, you have your own site, listpiration, how’s your bucket list coming along?
So far, so good. It’s gotten a really good response. It’s exciting. It’s just taken me a few years to figure out what to blog about, but doing it actually on my own now, I just see how much work goes into maintaining your own site and keeping up with copy and just keeping people engaged. It’s a really interesting learning project and I’m glad that people are enjoying it so far.
I think that officially I got the aha moment for this in April, earlier this year, and I was really trying to squeeze out an idea for a blog for the last two years, but nothing seemed natural. I kept doing other weird things off my bucket list, and thought, “oh, that’s really inspiring,” and then I think it just kind of clicked and I just decided. I kind of had a rough last two years and I had wanted to do more, and I decided to do at least one thing off my list. And I thought, “oh, I guess I can document it and see if maybe I can learn how to build a Web site from scratch and turning it into an experiment.”

Can you tell us a bit more about checking things off of your bucket list? What was it like to go surfing for the first time?
When it comes to my bucket list, I have vowed to myself to cross at least one item off of it each month. More than once is great, but I am making it a point to do at least one per month. Always have to have something exciting to look forward to. I choose based on what deals I can find via Zozi or LivingSocial (big fan of bucket listing on a budget if possible!) or if I plan to be traveling somewhere where I can accomplish it. :)

As for surfing, it was amazing! I was quite nervous because I had never swam out into the ocean that far. Before heading out to catch some waves, I booked a lesson in San Diego earlier this year while on vacation so I could learn. It helped having a really great instructor, showing the basics on land, then in the water, and then let me go on my own. I’m still a bit nervous going out into the water each time but once I’m out there, it’s so serene. It’s an interesting combination of being slightly worried and also calm. The ocean is a powerful thing but it’s also really beautiful. You just have to be aware of your surroundings and know not to go into waves above your experience level.

If you register for SMX East before September 30, you get $100 off. They are also offering free Expo+ passes for online learning. If you happen to catch Akvile at the conference, be sure to say hi and ask her how her bucket list is coming along.

First things first: September 25th is the iAcquire meetup in NYC, where Rhea will talk about scaling digital processes. She’ll be speaking alongside Joe Griffin, Chris Le and Cindy Nieves Boynton. Check out an interview with the speakers and preview below.

SMX East is practically in our backyard, taking place October 1-3rd; Pearl and Rhea will be there. If you register for SMX East before September 30th, you can save $100 and there are free Expo+ passes available.

But really, it’s a busy schedule, so if you’re going to be there, please contact us ahead of time so that we can set up a time to talk.

Finally (for now), have you been to Burlington, Vermont, lately? If not, you’re missing out on a great town, and I imagine it’s especially beautiful there in November. So, don’t miss out as Troy represents at the Vermont Web Marketing Summit on November 14th. If you register before Oct. 7, you get the early bird special, so act fast! Rhea will be speaking, along with Matt Gerrior from Greane Tree Technology, also in Troy.

If you’re not going to be joining us in person but want to follow the live updates, subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter. See you soon!

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/fall-2013-conference-schedule/feed/0Google Wants You to Out Good Sites. Really!http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-wants-you-to-out-good-sites-really/
http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-wants-you-to-out-good-sites-really/#commentsThu, 29 Aug 2013 15:52:03 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=16944Read More]]>Yesterday, Google’s Head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, shared a link to a simple Docs survey where they’re asking webmasters to report high-quality small sites that you think should rank better. Yes, you heard that right. They want to know about GOOD sites!

If there's a small website that you think should be doing better in Google, tell us more here: https://t.co/s80BibIBhN

If you’re like the Outspoken Media team, this was met with a company-wide, “wha?!”

While Google has been working hard over recent years to make it easier for the Web Spam team to connect with and inform webmasters, they’re usually looking for help outing bad sites. Whether it’s more support for reconsideration requests, new language on link schemes, or the recently released (then revoked, then re-released) Manual Actions report in Webmaster Tools.

For years we’ve debated the issue of size and brand as it relates to rankings and it’s interesting to see that Google is now soliciting advice from the masses to test the quality of the algorithm. The debate has raged since 2008 (and before). I put the “big business vs little guy” graphic together (thanks Todd for sharing it so long ago) to help sort through some hypocritical assumptions on Google’s part when it comes to website behavior. We’re used to the perception that big brands get away with murder while small businesses suffer, but I’ve always believed that when it comes to the algorithm it really is a matter of brand signals versus the actual size of the brand. The more sites behave like actual businesses and invest in brand development, the more they’ll align with the direction Google is going with quality signals for greater search rankings.

“only 30% of SEOs believe web site size does not matter in terms of rankings.”

At first we didn’t believe the survey was legit, because it’s so simple. How could Google possibly review all of the submissions they’ll undoubtedly receive? But truthfully, how many webmasters feel confident enough in their site’s backlink profile to submit?

Will you?

I know there are plenty of webmasters who believe in the legitimacy of their link building practices, but we typically find a history riddled with old, highly questionable links. At Outspoken, we work hard to rehab those efforts, but the threshold of what’s acceptable is changing daily with the most recent updates affecting press releases, guest posts, advertorials, and infographics.

It’s been interesting to see the reaction of fellow SEO consultants and webmasters and I’ll be curious to see what comes next from the Web Spam team. Do they feel like the algorithm is doing a good job and they want validation? Or are they as worried as the 70% of SEOs who feel that the algorithm really is favoring brands?

]]>http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-wants-you-to-out-good-sites-really/feed/9The Labor of Leaning Inhttp://outspokenmedia.com/announcements/the-labor-of-leaning-in/
http://outspokenmedia.com/announcements/the-labor-of-leaning-in/#commentsTue, 27 Aug 2013 15:00:10 +0000http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=16915Read More]]>Hi there! Long time, no blog. It’s been months since you heard from Outspoken Media and for that I apologize, but not profusely because sometimes there are moments when you have to take a step back or in our case, a step forward.

While we were away from the blog, we were very much present within the company itself. In the past year, we managed to accomplish a lot—new brand, new website, new office, new team members, and most important (to me)—a new human!

Meet William “Liam” Cornelius:

(No, I don’t share his last name, because there would have been too many redirects and backlinks to update after I got married. One day…)

Having a child shouldn’t be a company achievement, but as the CEO, it’s a luxury that I couldn’t afford until the business was in a certain place. And, until this year, the business couldn’t afford to be without me in it. This is why I believe it’s one of the strongest accomplishments in the business to date. It wasn’t a cake walk–leaning in required some professional sacrifice and a lot of preparation.

Everyone in a business should be replaceable, even the CEO. If you can’t maintain the day to day unless a specific a person is there, you’ve created a risky investment that depends entirely on life never happening to that individual. That may be fine in some industries, but in a client-facing business with many employees, I owed it to the team to replicate myself or in this case, enough of my parts to equal the sum.

You never know when a bus might hit you:

If life were like the movies, it would happen often. Instead, we usually get hit by a proverbial bus—childbirth, death of a loved one, an illness, etc.

The last thing you need to worry about in a time of grief or recovery is the daily operations of your organization or department. So, in an effort to make this post actionable, let’s talk about how Outspoken Media prepared for the extended absence of its CEO. In this case the reason was maternity leave, but this could be replaced with any major life scenario. I found my greatest mentor this past year was not another mom, but a local business leader recovering from breast cancer who was thrown into a period of absence and forced to trust her team.

Building the Right Team

My preparation started more than a year ago when I realized I needed the right people on the bus. Rather than looking at this from an individual standpoint, I evaluated the company’s needs and my workload. I needed to be completely honest about the company’s strengths and weaknesses, most importantly, my own. I worked closely with an organizational development consultant as well as an external Board of Advisors made up of other successful, local executives. What I learned from these mentors was that Outspoken Media didn’t suffer from a lack of leads, but experienced manpower, positive cash flow, and a strong operational foundation.

The first point is why it’s important to always be hiring great additions to your team. Hire talented individuals who match your culture and vision. However, it’s important to make sure you have an immediate role for them or there will be a lack of focus and/or sense of urgency in their performance. Put the word out about the skills you’re looking for. Sean Stahlman came to us because my friend, Mike King, knew I needed a skilled SEO with an agency background. He also knew Sean was looking for a change and was local to our area. I’d never met Sean, because he spent most of his time in Manhattan or Philadelphia while he was at Razorfish.

Each hire on our team has been a mix of good fortune and the result of being open to every possibility. Pearl was referred by a friend who previously worked for a local Ruby on Rails group. Philip walked through the front door after hearing about us from a friend in the local startup space. Amy was referred to us by her cousin who owned a local PR company. Melissa knew about us from The Business Review. I met Chrissy on a local mom group.

Notice that not a single one of these hires came from Craigslist, LinkedIn, or Monster.com? I’m not saying that these sites don’t add value, but in our line of work, the best team members come from referrals—people who have already vetted the personality and knowledge of the prospective employee, and who understand the needs of the company.

Creating Company Culture

Once I had the right people, I made it clear what was expected of them professionally and this often meant what wouldn’t be tolerated—drama.

It may sound simple to say, “no drama,” but when you clearly state this and explain what it looks like in a work environment, things run much smoother. For us, no drama meant no gossiping, no back talking, being actively involved, using constructive criticism, being helpful, and if a problem arose, addressing that person directly unless it required the intervention of a superior. I told the team that if they had drama, it should be about the work or the industry, not each other. When you work hard, you don’t have room for gossip. And, in one year, we’ve had zero issues. Yes, zero. Our company culture is productive, supportive, and passionate. That’s rare.

Defining Individual Mentorship

One of the single most important lessons I’ve learned in the past year is that an employee cannot perform the role you’ve given them without proper training. If someone is promoted to management, but they were never trained on what it means to be a manager, they will typically fail. The same is true of any new role or responsibility. Now, when I see horribly mismanaged situations or ineffective communication in a business, I don’t assume that the employee is bad, I recognize that they probably had insufficient training or are suffering from learning anxiety.

As the CEO, it is always 100% my fault what happens in this business, so I had to create a routine for effective communication with the team. I needed to evaluate not just their technical proficiency and client management, but personal satisfaction and future needs. Employing someone is a two-way street. I have a role that needs to be filled, but the team has a future that they want to build and they need the potential for growth if they’re going to stick around. Without a clear, personalized plan in place and vision for the near future, there’s no motivation to invest in personal education or long-term vision.

Sean and I started doing weekly, individual mentorship meetings with everyone on the team. We’re a small organization, so for now, this works. As we grow, I’ll have to evaluate the time spent on these meetings and how we scale them. Some weeks we skip the meetings if everyone is slammed. Some days one person’s meeting might take 45 minutes and another’s five minutes. The meeting is rooted entirely in the individual needs of the team member, so they feel supported, capable, and confident. This is even more important in an industry that’s evolving daily. We have to empower the team and assure them that their ideas are sound and there’s a clear plan for implementation and ongoing training.

Holding After-Action Reviews

In addition to mentorship, we continued to hold After-Action Reviews (which I’ve spoken about often as they relate to achieving business objectives), because the mentorship meetings were to touch on personal growth, not to evaluate performance of larger projects. To effectively manage, you have to teach in the moment or the lesson is lost. The point of an AAR meeting is to quickly summarize how a project went and what skills needed to be learned or lessons shared with everyone on the team for the future.

Increasing Cash Flow

One of the hardest financial lessons of 2012 was cash flow. We found ourselves working with a number of large brands on big projects. This was great—we were growing and tackling more sophisticated work as a competitive, national agency. Unfortunately, big projects and brands often come with a net 90 or the dreaded 120 invoice period and that’s after the invoice was processed. This meant that we worked for free for almost four months without receiving payment. In the past we’d usually worked with companies that were more nimble and we could receive a check quickly.

I also recognized that I am mediocre at best with the finances of the business. I attribute this to something many client-facing marketers will understand—it’s hard to invoice someone for work that you’re still performing. You need to separate the finances from client management.

Investing in Your Non-Billables

Once we hired Chrissy to manage the books she had us ahead of cash flow in no time. We had a clear budget, the books were getting reconciled effectively, and we could start to look into more advanced areas of the business like profit sharing and how to expedite cash flow through alternative forms of payment. Chrissy also evaluated our tool set and was given free reign to question our expenses. This led to the transition from InfusionSoft to Sugar CRM as well as a number of other decisions including a quote for the development of a network that will allow us to check in and out of an individual software licenses for less commonly used tools versus installing multiple licenses on each machine.

Expediting the Sales Process

We’ve never had a sales team. Are you submitting a lead on our site or calling the phone? Then you were reaching (or as was more often the case, not reaching), me! The company phone line was my personal cell until a few months ago and the leads went directly to my personal inbox. There were some points in the business where we would receive more than fifty leads per week. When I’m responsible for the client work, client management, finances, new business, marketing/speaking, HR, education, and operations… balls got dropped. Often.

This is the single greatest shame I have in the company. For years I would simply not respond to voicemails or leads, because we were too overwhelmed and I knew that talking to someone would mean an obligation to vet the work, find someone to refer them to (which for five years has proven to be incredibly hard), or we’d have another proposal to add to my growing list. It was easier to simply respond to the most promising leads and allow this crucial area of customer service to flounder. As a reputation management “expert” this is a problem. A gigantic problem. A festering, open sore that needed to heal.

Finally, we did it!

We started slowly developing great proposal templates. Then we found proposal software that would allow us to electronically send and accept proposals. We also developed a process where Chrissy would stage the proposals and Sean (in my absence) or I would add the recommendations and pricing.

While this worked great for awhile, the number of leads have picked up again to a point where we need someone full-time. I’ve spent more than a year thinking about this role and I have my ideal vision for this person, but still can’t locate them. So, listen up to see if maybe you or someone you know would excel at business development in a growing, nationally recognized agency.

Business development is about more than cold calls, so I don’t want someone with just a sales background. We need someone who can filter through inbound leads, respond to everyone, refer folks out to partners (and vet those partners through meetings, calls, and follow-up), write proposals, follow-up with potential clients, field questions, and strategize ways to drive more qualified leads. We want an industry expert who can hold his or her own in a discussion on the latest Google updates, but also has enough historical context to not be reactionary to them. They need to know which industries are over-saturated and they should be able to sniff out spam a mile away. This person should also be a marketing powerhouse. Like me, I want a “name” who can drive leads simply because of who they are and what they know. They will blog, speak nationally, connect socially, organize strategic events, develop partnerships, and most important—also tackle 5-10% client work so they’re always kept in the loop with our methods and client management.

Know someone? Is this person YOU? You must be willing to relocate. Message me direct (rhea at outspokenmedia dot come).

Investing in Employee Benefits

Maybe something mushy happened to me on maternity leave, but suddenly I felt very maternal not just with my child, but the company. I know a lot of this came from how I viewed my husband’s flexible schedule (or lack thereof). It’s important to me that our team feels taken care of and like they belong to something great, not just another 9 to 5. Security is the single greatest motivation after food, water, and shelter.

To this end, I wanted our non-government pension company to offer a really competitive benefits package, which we’d never truly defined before. Yes, we had benefits, we just didn’t have a “package” for folks to look at. Now we do, and what’s coming in 2014 is super exciting:

Behaving Like a Fifty-Person Company

As a business owner, I hear a lot about the fifty-person company. Fifty employees is the magical number where everything changes. Growth feels scary when you know this number is approaching and suddenly you’ll have to accommodate more regulations.

I didn’t want to wait until we hit fifty employees to offer those kinds of benefits. I wanted to start today with whatever we could reasonably tackle. The easiest of which (and most urgently needed) was a lactation room. This may sound simple to some, but for a nursing mother, the physical need to pump breast milk is a painful, anxiety-ridden situation that often leads to giving up on the whole process. The decision to nurse or do formula is a personal choice, but for a mother there are health benefits to nursing, not only for the baby, but the mother herself. I wanted to give mothers (and myself) the best opportunity possible to successfully do this by accommodating their physical and emotional needs.

So, we created a little area in a call room that’s blocked off, set-up a white noise machine, and went a step further by renting a medical grade pump so moms don’t have to bring their own equipment into the office. There’s nothing that screams “I’m a mom!” more than lugging your bag of parts around and for a new, sleep-deprived mother, trying to remember all of the pieces as well as your child and work necessities, is near impossible.

No wonder so many moms return to work part-time or not at all. Curious about other agencies’ maternity leave policies, I asked several and found that many provide a bonus to mothers who return to work, but few do. We need to make it easier for parents (regardless of gender) to have the flexibility and support they need.

Filling the New CEO Position

When Outspoken Media formed, I wasn’t the CEO. I knew that one day I would want to be, but I didn’t have the leadership or management skills needed to do so then. Years later, when the first partner buyout came, I assumed the role of “acting CEO” and eventually realized that I had no desire to relinquish control to some suit just because I didn’t look like the picture of a CEO in my head, especially after performing adequately in the new role. However, I still didn’t feel fit for it.

After being honored as one of the Capital District’s 40 Under 40 this year (three months after my 30th birthday), I finally feel like I deserve this role. It took a lot of mistakes to get here, but I’ve grown from each lesson and become a stronger marketer, leader, and person. Having finally come into my own as a CEO, it was time to step into a far scarier role—mother. I knew that motherhood would bring uncertainty. After the birth of my son, would I still have the desire to run the business? That was the single biggest fear I had. Would I fall so completely in love with my child that I would give up my first baby (Outspoken Media) to be with him? I knew that financially my family couldn’t afford that choice, but emotionally, I soon discovered that I needed the business and my worries were unfounded. The company is a part of who I am and I want my son to see what I built, especially since I don’t come from an entrepreneurial family. I want him to know that you create the path you want in life and everything is possible with hard work, a positive attitude, and an eye for opportunity.

It was important to me that I return with a flexible schedule, so I could still spend as much time with my child as possible. And, I wanted those flex days to have opportunities for work, but not client work, because I’d managed to get out of the day-to-day affairs and it was important this continue if I was ever going to embrace my role as CEO. I had to be more outward, more entrenched in the industry, doing more research, developing partnerships, finding team members, marketing the business through my writings/speaking, etc. I couldn’t do that if every workday was spent on client calls and reviewing the team’s work. I had to trust that I had trained my team and Sean would take the lead with quality assurance. I would still be on the monthly calls, available to the team for any questions, and reviewing performance, but no more micro managing or hand-holding.

But first, I had to get through maternity leave.

Honoring Maternity Leave

Maternity leave? What’s that?! I mean, Marissa Mayer popped a kid out, took two weeks off and was back in the office. Who needs maternity leave these days? Well, as I quickly learned, what works for high-powered executives with a large team of support and limitless funds, does not always work in the average American’s life (as most of us undoubtedly realize and truthfully, so does Marissa Mayer who recently extended parental leave and added a ton of other benefits). And, for many new parents, regardless of the financial and physical demands of having a baby, there is an intense emotional need to bond with your kiddo. My situation turned out to be a bit extreme as well.

Without going into the details, the baby came three weeks early, on Mother’s Day, and we had a month of complications following the labor. Both my son and I were in and out of the hospital for various situations, but today we’re both very happy and healthy.

I’m not going to pretend like my son’s birth was the best day of my life, because it wasn’t. It was exhausting and painful and I was mad at him when he was born for putting us through such a difficult labor. As a new parent, I spent the next few weeks fumbling through life with torturous sleep deprivation, emotional highs and lows, and a paralyzing fear that at any moment I would do something to hurt my child.

As any parent knows, there’s no greater emotional torment than feeling helpless with your new baby. Those first few weeks were physically and emotionally debilitating. Slowly, as the “baby blues” went away and our son grew older, I regained some sanity and perspective. And today, aside from still not getting much sleep, we have our routine and my husband and I are totally in love with this little man. The best day of my life came when he smiled for the first time and each day since as he finds his laugh. It’s magical to watch him discover the world.

Most parents can relate to the above. Now, for business owners, managers, and team leaders, you can also relate to the longing I felt to return to my business. During delivery, I was still taking calls and responding to emails. A week after my son’s birth, I was sitting in the office, running through the status of client work. That evening, my son went into the ER and spent the next three days in the NICU. Talk about a sledgehammer of guilt. I felt like I was being punished for returning to the business a week after labor. The GPP (Good Parent Police) had seen me sitting in the office with my newborn and decided to hurt him for my transgressions.

I now realize that we’d both been recovering from the labor still and to prove it, our bodies put us out of commission for three more weeks. By the time we’d fully recovered, my four weeks of maternity leave were up and we hadn’t even had a chance to bond or establish a routine, yet! So, I took more time. I checked into the office as much as I could. I’d bring my son with me and the team was great with both of us.

I couldn’t ask for a better team to have gone through this with. Now I get what maternity leave is about and I never want to see a parent rush back to work for fear of their job or mismanagement of their workload. Likewise, being a parent has made me a more capable leader and it is with this perspective that I returned to work and you, our loyal friends and community.

Thank you for letting us do what needed to be done as a business and for me personally. We are stronger for it, and this time showed me that it’s okay to let go of certain areas if you always remain focused on the three most important: the team, the work, and life balance.